Thursday, July 11, 2013

Indiana Marriage Law UPDATE

Without an intent to fraudulently obtain a marriage license, there is
no crime in question. Proving intent to defraud the state to obtain an
illegal marriage would be a stiff burden for any prosecutor to take on,
especially with a civil disobedience/protest defense available. What's
more, even if such a case were miraculously successful, there are a
great many avenues of appeal that would almost certainly overturn any
conviction of this type.

It has always been illegal for a clerk or other official to accept
knowingly false information to issue a marriage license (or other
government permit or document) so, again, nothing new here except a
lesser penalty for the infraction.

Indiana has not created new laws with regard to same-sex marriage and
the changes to existing law do not change the legal landscape other
than to lower the penalties for infractions of this law. This new
concern doesn't stem from new law, but the confluence of a 1997 law
criminalizing false information on a marriage application, the 2003 law
banning same-sex marriage in Indiana, and the slow-moving modernization
efforts, which have been ongoing for nearly a decade (and which has not
rolled out to all of Indiana's 92 counties.)

What this incident actually proves is a bigger point about how these
marriage bans are mean-spirited and discriminatory in addition to not
being well thought out. It says a lot about the unintended consequences
of such laws when two loving people, who simply want to share a life
together, have to worry about potentially breaking the law just to ask
to be married.

Since this blog had mentioned the story where it seemed that Indiana had taken some draconian measures against same-sex couples reminiscent of what is happening in parts of Africa, it's only fitting that the clarification also appears here.